First in Freedom: What America's 250th Birthday Should Actually Mean to Gen Z

First in Freedom: What America's 250th Birthday Should Actually Mean to Gen Z

We're throwing the biggest birthday party in the nation's history — and my generation is the least sure it's worth celebrating. Here's why that's fixable, and what 250 years of North Carolina history has to do with it.

America just turned 250, and the country is throwing a year-long party — the largest-ever flotilla of tall ships sailed into New York Harbor, and locally, a free all-day festival at the North Carolina State Capitol on the Fourth, with a Declaration reading and a citizenship ceremony. That same week, Gallup found American pride at its lowest in the 25 years it has asked — with Gen Z the least proud generation in the country.

250 years is almost a miracle

Countries don't just last. The United States has the oldest written national framework of government on Earth, longer-lived than any other national constitution. Over the same span, France has cycled through ten constitutional orders — five republics, two empires, a monarchy, two dictatorships — and El Salvador has had thirty-six constitutions since 1824. We've had one.

The founders never claimed perfection; the Constitution's stated goal is "in Order to form a more perfect Union". Slavery existed at the founding, and women couldn't vote nationally, save rare exceptions like property-owning women in New Jersey. But they built a system that could correct itself — and now it's our turn.

So why isn't my generation proud?

Gallup's 2026 poll found about 53% of adults call themselves extremely or very proud to be American — the lowest in 25 years — and just 41% of Gen Z, against 83% of the Silent Generation.

Patriotism is a tradition that has to be handed down, and for much of my generation that transmission got interrupted: we heard plenty about America's real failures but not the ideals that made the critique possible. This generation isn't hostile to its country — it was never properly introduced to it. You fix that by picking the story back up and handing it down: honest about the failures, breathtaking about the ideals.

The story hiding in our own backyard

In 1765, Britain passed the Stamp Act, a tax on nearly every piece of paper in colonial life. Boston gets most of the credit, but some of the earliest and most forceful armed resistance happened in the Cape Fear. A Wilmington merchant named Cornelius Harnett — "the Samuel Adams of North Carolina" — chaired the Sons of Liberty here. On October 19, 1765, he led some five hundred locals to a bonfire at the Wilmington courthouse to burn an effigy and go house to house, making every gentleman toast "Liberty, Property, and no Stamp Duty." Months later, as many as a thousand armed men forced the royal governor's officials to swear they'd never issue stamped paper. North Carolina blocked any enforcement of the Stamp Act — one man, five hundred neighbors, and a bonfire.

It wasn't only the men. In 1774, in Edenton, Penelope Barker gathered around fifty women to boycott British goods and sign a formal political resolution — almost unheard of at the time. The Edenton Tea Party is remembered as one of the first political actions led by women in America, and in Wilmington women protested by burning tea in the streets.

On April 12, 1776, North Carolina's Fourth Provincial Congress met in Halifax and produced the Halifax Resolves — the first official action by any of the thirteen colonies calling for independence, and the first authorizing its delegates to vote for it. Virginia followed; on July 4 came the Declaration. The ground had been set weeks earlier at Moores Creek Bridge, the state's first decisive Patriot victory, twenty miles from Wilmington.

North Carolina didn't just help start the Revolution; it helped finish it. In 1780, the Overmountain Men, frontiersmen from the western mountains, crushed a Loyalist army at Kings Mountain, a battle Thomas Jefferson called "the turn of the tide." In 1781, at Guilford Courthouse near Greensboro, General Nathanael Greene bled Lord Cornwallis so badly a British statesman said, "Another such victory would ruin the British army." Cornwallis limped to Wilmington to resupply — the city that had defied his king over tax stamps sixteen years earlier — then marched to Virginia and surrendered at Yorktown five months later. North Carolina was there at the opening bell and the closing bell.

The choice at 250

Now the chisel is in our hands, and at 250 there's no middle option. We can preserve this union and carry it closer to its ideals — or walk away from the sacrifice of everyone who put on the uniform and bled so we could stand here free enough to have this argument. Indifference isn't a third path; freedom that isn't actively preserved erodes and gets handed to whoever wants it more.

No government or media outlet talks a generation into loving its country; that work falls to individuals, families, and communities, the way it did in 1765. So before the year is out, go to something — a 250th event or historic site — learn your town's founding story and tell it to somebody younger. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, freedom is never more than one generation from extinction: it must be fought for and handed on, not passed down in the bloodstream. We're the generation that gets to prove the experiment still works. So what's your vision for America — and how will you help her get there?